• Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      1 hour ago

      The Hammer & Sickle is the symbol of Marxism-Leninism, not just the USSR. There are several Marxist-Leninist states to this day, including the PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and the DPRK.

  • oyzmo@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Socialism allows for both public and private ownership, individual freedoms, and democratic decision-making, while still aiming for social equality. Communism, in contrast, tends to involve total state control and often limits personal freedoms.

    • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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      1 hour ago

      Tell me you’ve never read anything about communism that wasn’t written by anti-communists without telling me you’ve never read anything about communism that wasn’t written by anti-communists.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      Both Capitalism and Socialism have room for public and private ownership, the difference is which sector controls the state, large firms, and key industries. The Nordic Countries are dominated by Private Capital, ie it is Capitalist, while the PRC is dominated by Public Ownership, ie it is Socialist.

      Communism limits the personal freedoms of the bourgeoisie. All Communism is, is a more developed and global form of Socialism, where the small firms that once were private have all grown into the public sector or collapsed.

    • m532@lemmygrad.ml
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      8 hours ago

      Limits personal freedoms only for the owning class. If you’re not a landlord or ceo you have nothing to fear.

      • Liberteez@lemm.ee
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        8 hours ago

        Tell that to the masses Lenin, Stalin, and Mao killed

        I support communes, and Anarcho communism sounds lovely. Once authority is involved, they tend to fail

        • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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          1 hour ago

          How are you going to secure your commune from external enemies without invoking authority?

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          3 hours ago

          The Black Book of Communism was debunked long ago, from including Nazis killed during World War II as “victims of Communism” to literally making up numbers to get to 100 million dead to being outright disproven once the Soviet Archives were opened up.

          There were excess deaths, but Communist leaders weren’t mindless butchers, either. And with the introduction of Socialism came numerous benefits for the working class, like a doubling of life expectancy, tripling of literacy rates to 99.9%, free and high quality education, healthcare, and childcare, an expansion in women’s rights, a democratization of the economy, and much more.

          Anarchism is a beautiful idea, and I used to be one. However, I am more convinced of Marxism, namely because we have more data that shows the success of Marxism, and because hierarchy and centralization are requirements for expansive infrastructure projects like high speed rail and for complex production, such as for smartphones.

          I have an introductory Marxist-Leninist Reading List you can check out, if you’d like to learn more.

  • Grimel@lemm.ee
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    9 hours ago

    Ah yes, get rid of extremism with different extremism. I think we’ve been there already. Spoiler: Didnt work.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      First, a societal organization outside the Western norm has no bearing on if it will be successful or not. The “middle” has no superior intrinsic characteristics.

      Second, we know Socialism works, the PRC is now becoming the de facto world power as the US falls, all while providing dramatic improvements for its people and increasing levels of satisfaction.

      What, specifically, doesn’t work?

      • Grimel@lemm.ee
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        3 hours ago

        Extremism is “the quality or state of being extreme” or “the advocacy of extreme measures or views”.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremism

        Or as i know it with these regimes both left or right: those that oppose and do not belive in our thing must be gotten rid of. I would say that is the extreme here to me. Thats what both communists and nazis did in Europe, in my country, in my city. And i want none of it to come back. Iam honestly terrified where is this world headding again.

        But if you want to take a deeper look, this seems interesting if you have access:

        https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-83336-7_2

        https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-political-extremist-1857297

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          2 hours ago

          The portrayal of the Communists and Nazis as “twin evils” exaggerates the sins of the Communists in quantity and quality, while minimizing the sins of the Nazis in quantity and quality, in order to show them as relatively equal problems. In other words, its Nazi apologia, and historical revisionism. Read Blackshirts and Reds.

          The Nazis executed the Communists, Socialists, gay people, trans people, disabled people, Jewish people, Slavic people, and many, many more. It wasn’t simple opposition, it was a racially supremacist ideology.

          The Communists executed Tsarists, fascists, and terrorists to the state. They did not create a systematic industrialized murder machine like the Nazis did in order to keep up with how many people they needed to kill.

          • Grimel@lemm.ee
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            19 minutes ago

            I can agree with you in some parts. They did not have any industrialized murder machine. But they mass murdered Polish by bullet, Ukrainians by starvation for example.

            Communists imprisoned and/or sent to forced labor people for being gay, religious (not only jews) and yes “terrorists to the state” which in most of the time meant someone just spoke against regime. And well being a prisoner in Communist countries meant you were treated almost like jew in a nazi camp just without killing part sometimes.

            All that said by my opinion communism wasnt racially supremacist ideology. It was just supremacist ideology. All they cared about was how great the state is and everything else is not.

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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              16 minutes ago

              They did not mass murder the Polish, nor did they intentionally starve Ukrainians. Both of those claims are highly inaccurate, the Nazis exterminated the Polish and the 1930s famine was unintended and tragic.

              Further, your claims about the prison system are highly distorted in quantity and quality, they in no way compared to the industrial mass murder machines in Nazi Germany. Read Russian Justice.

              Communism is about uplifting the working class, not worship of the state.

  • eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    15 hours ago

    Maaaaaaybe the USSR isn’t the best example of a better society we want to be building.

    I’m watching the whole ideological-purge thing happen in the US and it kinda sucks.

    • ptee@lemm.ee
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      25 minutes ago

      Both extremes on display those examples, seems like they both end up in the same place in the end. Maybe it would be reasonable to use any system that is a mix of things, instead of focusing on pure capitalism or communism.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        5 minutes ago

        There’s really no such thing as a pure system, any mix is still going to have either the public sector as principle or private, ie which controls the state, large firms, and key industries. There’s no way to keep them “balanced,” one will have power over the other, and its best for it to be the public sector.

    • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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      10 hours ago

      Either build something better or shutup, I say. Unless you’re a big fan of Tsarist Russia

      • rational_lib@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        I’ve played civilization and I’m pretty sure there’s other forms of government besides Communism and Monarchy that have low corruption, albeit lacking the ability to force the citizens into war on the leader’s whim.

      • Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
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        Human nature. We need living people to tell us what happened the last time something happened society-wide, else we forget and repeat the same mistakes. It’s the whole hard times make strong men thing. It’s on about an 80 year cycle. The good news is that we’re right at the point in the cycle where real changes are easy to make.

        Read the book The Fourth Turning for many examples of the pattern repeating.

        • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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          It’s the whole hard times make strong men thing.

          Which is literal fascist propaganda

  • void_turtle@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    17 hours ago

    The desire to dominate and the willingness to act on it has existed in a fraction of the population since before humans were human. This is the root of all evil, capitalism is a specific manifestation of this impulse that has only existed for some 400 years. If your analysis starts and ends at “capitalism bad” you miss the vast majority of oppression that has existed or will exist.

    • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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      10 hours ago

      What’s your evidence for your the root of evil is that some people just have an “evil” gene theory?

      • void_turtle@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 hours ago

        I never mentioned genetics, strange that you would bring it up. Sex isn’t even fully determined by genetics, something as complex and fragile as your personal values certainly can never be reduced to genetics.

        Humans brains are stochastic and the values we eventually settle on depend both on our environment and on somewhat random walks through possible values. Some people will land on violent domination as a social strategy just through randomness. I believe an environment where everyone is cared for and has the ability to flourish will minimize the people who randomly end up on violent domination, but it is not possible through environmental changes to completely prevent this. Thus we cannot allow any positions of power, since those will attract and eventually be captured by people who have chosen domination as their preferred strategy.

  • random@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 hours ago

    “capitalism is evil”

    so what’s not evil?

    “a totalitarian socialist shithole, where you got no freedom or human rights”

    • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.ca
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      A river floods every year. If someone builds a house next to it and the river takes it, is the river evil, or is the person suffering the consequences of their own ignorance? The consequences of capitalism are predictable and inevitable. The behaviour of a dollar is almost as predictable as that of an electron. Why do people pretend like we don’t know what is going to happen?

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          You don’t really have free speech in Capitalism, all of the important media is entirely controlled by private interests to begin with. Further, with what freedoms we do have, why deliberately plug your ears? Do you just want the freedom to ignore inconvenient truths?

  • Necroscope0@lemm.ee
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    15 hours ago

    It is the symptom, not the cause. Greed is the cause and it has been around a LOT longer than Capitalism.

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    20 hours ago

    I’d say 1 person owning most of the money made at the company is the problem

    To solve it everyone just needs to form or join a private unionized cooperative that doesn’t go on stock market for sustainable growth and so everyone at the company is making a lot of money too

    Then collectively you all grow the pot that is available for all of you. Better to all be making 1,000,000 each and then grow it together to become 10,000,000-100,000,000+ for each of you

    That is the root issue. Not enough of that

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      20 hours ago

      This doesn’t solve the systemic pressures within Capitalism, nor does it describe how to get from A to B. Your idea still depends on your one firm outcompeting other firms, which is difficult in saturated markets.

      I recommend you look into Marxist theory, I have some recommendations I can make.

  • Mangoholic@lemmy.ml
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    13 hours ago

    Capitalism is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil. The red hand without the ussr symbol would make this image more unified.

    • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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      12 hours ago

      That’s like saying

      “Nazism is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil.”

      or

      “The Transatlantic slave trade is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil.”

      What are you talking about? Systems are created by people; they don’t just pop into existence.

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        7 hours ago

        You said it yourself the systems are created by people, the people can be evil. They are the root of the evil aka anyone upholding capitalism because they profit even tho they know exactly how bad it is for the world and people, just like the people creating fascism the fascist are the root of evil.